“Streaming saved the music industry.”

Every time, something feels off. Let’s take it from the top.

Yes, music industry revenues collapsed in the 2000s. Napster and piracy blew a hole in CD sales. Global recorded music revenue bottomed out around 2014 and has grown since, largely due to streaming. So yes, streaming gave a massive boost to the major labels and mainstream artists.

But saved what, exactly? And for whom?

Streaming Won Because It Was Cheap

Streaming became a habit because it was heavily subsidized and cheap. Whatever is cheap or free, if it works well enough, gets adopted by the mainstream.

€9.99 for access to almost every song ever recorded is not a random number, it’s a strategic one.

In the early years, Spotify scaled globally while losing money. Venture capital funded infrastructure, hiring, product strengthening. The major labels, facing a collapsing CD market, negotiated licensing deals, and in several cases, equity stakes. They saw streaming as the vehicle to reassert control in the new digital domain. Instead of letting hardware companies like Apple define the future (as happened with iTunes), this time they negotiated the structure as early as possible.

The result: the price of music was locked extremely low, distribution power consolidated fast, and the rules of artist payouts were baked into “the system”.

Once €9.99 became the norm, others followed through. And that anchor is very hard to move.

The Game Is Structurally Skewed

Most streaming platforms operate on a pro-rata model. All subscription revenue goes into one pool. Artists are paid according to their share of total streams.

That means if you spend a month listening exclusively to underground electronic music, your money does not go to those artists. It gets redistributed across the entire platform — heavily weighted toward the most-streamed global acts.

And who controls what gets streamed at scale? The platform does. Through algorithms, editorial playlists, and reserved promotional slots, the system is structured to advantage size and concentration. Scale favors the majors. And once scale dominates, everything else has to operate inside that “gravity”.

“But Revenues Are Up”

For whom? Who is actually capturing that growth?

Major labels secured long-term leverage during this digital reset. Superstars created by majors obviously benefit from global passive listening. Platforms monetize attention and control discovery.

Meanwhile, independent and mid-tier artists compete in a hyper-saturated environment where fractions of cents per stream are the norm, and the volume required to generate meaningful income is out of reach for most.

The underground has it worst. Historically, small scenes with passionate local support were the engine of musical innovation. People bought records. They paid directly. There was friction, identity, commitment — and that concentration of support actually sustained artists. A few hundred devoted fans buying vinyl, attending shows, and paying for downloads could fund a record. Today, those same fans streaming daily generate often less than a cup of coffee per month for the artist. The economic density that allowed subcultures to sustain themselves has been thinned out. The problem is culture needs density to evolve.

By Comparison: The Download Era

When Steve Jobs introduced the $0.99 per download, it offered to consumers a pragmatic per-unit relationship. You bought something, you owned it. On the contrary, streaming replaced ownership with rental.

Access replaced effort. And that friction that once meant commitment, identity, passion, was gone.

Once the model was normalized, Apple, Amazon, and Google all followed the same pricing logic. Not because it was profitable, but to secure their interests and because they could afford to — their music services exist to support hardware and subscription ecosystems, not to sustain music as an economy. Imagine someone would try to launch a fair service today at that costs €25 a month and distributes more income to indie artists. Nobody would pay that, so the anchor holds.

What a Fair System Would Look Like

If streaming paid artists proportionally to what each individual user actually listens to — a user-centric model — the math changes significantly for niche artists. Your money follows your ears, not the platform average.

Also, if the price hadn’t been subsidized for years to gain market dominance, it would have found a higher floor.

If margins for niche ecosystems were protected rather than pooled away, independent music could sustain itself inside the model.

These aren’t radical ideas — user-centric payouts have been discussed for years. SoundCloud experimented with the model. Deezer has advocated for it publicly. The resistance comes from those who benefit most from the current distribution of the pool.

Saved For Whom?

When people say streaming saved music, they usually mean: it stabilized revenue for platforms and major labels, and created genuine convenience for most consumers. Okay, true.

But it also concentrated power, locked in low price expectations, detached listening from direct economic support for artists, and incentivized passive engagement over depth and connection.

Convenience is powerful. But convenience is not the same as fairness — and it is not the same as a healthy ecosystem.

Streaming should exist. Easy discovery has value. But the current model was designed to serve platforms and major labels first, and it shows. The question isn’t whether streaming belongs in the future — it’s whether we’re able to disrupt the system and how, so that the people who actually make the music can live inside it.